Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Convert Keynote / iWork 2009 to 2008

If you're like me, you tried Keynote 2009 and - while Keynote continues to be a superior presentation tool - decided that it wasn't worth the cost of upgrading. If you're even more like me, you created at least one presentation in Keynote 2009 during the trial (or converted a Keynote 2008 presentation to Keynote 2009 and tweaked it a bit), and were then quite dismayed to find that you could not open the Keynote 2009 file in Keynote 2008 at all. This is a big problem after the trial runs out - it leaves you with presentation material you can't recover!

The Keynote 2008 "file format" is really a directory structure. That is, each .key file is really a directory containing the information that Keynote uses to reconstruct the presentation. In Keynote 2009 this changed to a "flat file" format - they .key file really is a single file. Investigation reveals pretty quickly that the contents of that file are quite similar to the contents of the 2008 directory. A post by linux4research cleared this up - the 2009 format is actually a zipped archive! So half the battle is to simply rename the .key file to a .zip file, unzip it, then rename the unzipped folder with a .key extension. This still won't open in Keynote 2008, though. Luckily the other half of the battle is equally as simple. In they .key folder, open the file index.apxl, find the string key:version= followed by a quoted string that is probably something like 92008xxxxxx. Replace the number with 72007061400.

Anyways, here is a shell script that automates this process. I haven't tested it too extensively, but the basic idea should work. I haven't had experience with other iWork '09 programs (Pages, Numbers), but reportedly the differences are essentially the same, so it may work with them as well if you replace "key" with the proper extension.

Rename the .key file to .zip and then unzip it - the result should be a folder. I.e. if your keynote file was MyPres.key, rename it to MyPres.zip and then unzip it and you should obtain a folder just called MyPres. You can edit the .apxl file, then rename the directory with a .key extension. If you don't want to overwrite the original file (safest, recommended), name it e.g. MyPres08.key

Hi Dan,thanks a lot, that was really helpful. I am working with 09, but I have to convert to 08 to be able to use the swf export feature. It works well (I get my flash at the end of the process) but there is something strange when I open the keynote: my template is based on a red color, and on the keynote 08, slides are ... blue. The flash swf I get is red as the original. Do you have any idea of what might happen there?Best,JM

I'm not sure I can be of much help :-/ I would guess there's a difference in the way the colors are stored in the two different versions of KeyNote, and that if you can figure out the difference, you could fix it manually. If you're ambitious, you could create a new file with the right background color and compare the apxl files. I'm looking at one of mine now and it has a bunch of lines looking like:

Thanks, I googled for this and your answer popped up. I can open the keynote I wanted, which is great. Unfortunately, I get some warnings about missing files in the master slide. Anyway I can read the content, which is most important.

Absolutely amazing! Instructions were precise and easy to follow, even for someone with zero experience working with code. You are my hero, having saved me countless hours trying to reconstruct a presentation!